It worked great in Sun's phone emulator, it worked great on my Motorola RAZR that's running Sun's JVM. And then someone else tried it out. And it failed. It failed in a weird way... the text labels on UI elements were invisible. The program itself ran, but there's no text.

This is on a Motorola Q with Windows Mobile 5.0 and the IBM WebSphere Everywhere Micro Environment. That environment is supposedly compatible with the CLDC 1.0/MIDP 2.0 that I built the JAR for. That's the same environment running on my RAZR.

So much for write once, run everywhere. 12 years, let me just repeat that: 12 years, after the introduction of this technology I'm reduced to downloading IBM's entire environment just to be able to debug an application because it doesn't work.

And people wonder why I shy away from Java. Every time I touch it, it bites me.

Monday, October 29, 2007

A Java client implementation of Steve Gibson's PPP

I recently produced an open source implementation of Steve Gibson's Perfect Paper Passwords system in C. It occurred to me that a better implementation would be a Java client for my mobile phone (thus eliminating the need for printing and carrying the paper passwords).

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Times Square: a fun spammer GIF

Nick FitzGerald reported a neat spammer image trick to me the other day. It's entered in The Spammers' Compendium that involves using animation to display the word Viagra emulating a flashing neon sign.

Since many OCR systems merge the layers together before OCR this image is actually in the 'wrong' order. Once merged the letters are in the order VIRAAG.

To make it a bit easier to visualize here's an integration of SOC with Google Maps. You can either type in an address to navigate to that address and see the SOC, or type in a SOC to navigate to that location.

Friday, October 12, 2007

An open source implementation of Steve Gibson's PPP algorithm

Steve Gibson has come up with a simple two-factor password scheme that relies on printed cards of passcodes generated using a combination of SHA-384 and Rijndael. The idea is that a system could prompt the user for one of the passcodes in addition to their normal password.

As usual he's released code written in assembly language as a DLL for Windows. He hasn't released his source code (he never does), so I thought it would be interesting to write my own implementation of his algorithm. Here's the C code:

Now that's a little less flexible than all the options given in Steve's ppp.exe implementation, but it does compute the correct output and can easily be modified if you want your own implementation with source of PPP.

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